gruppo nanou presents the second chapter of “Overlook Hotel”
«The body acts in the present, the image inhabits a recent past»

The work from June 1 to 7 at the Mercato Coperto

Ravenna — As part of Ravenna Festival, the city's Mercato Coperto (Piazza Andrea Costa, 6) prepares to host the world premiere of "goldroom". From Monday, June 1 to Sunday, June 7 (excluding June 3 and 4), with two daily performances at 7 PM and 9 PM, gruppo nanou presents the second chapter of the "Overlook Hotel" cycle, created by choreographers Marco Valerio Amico and Rhuena Bracci. Following the success of "redrum", awarded the Ubu 2024, this new choreographic installation explores memory and time, drawing inspiration from the celebrated and unsettling ballroom in "The Shining". Between Bruno Dorella's music and a hypnotic play of light, the audience will find itself immersed in an unstable and constantly shifting space. Ahead of the event, we interviewed the company.

After redrum, awarded at the Ubu 2024, you return to the world of The Shining with goldroom. What changes in this second chapter? And how do you move from the geometry of the "inside/outside" of redrum to the mental space of the Overlook Hotel's ballroom?

In redrum we only began to erode the boundary between spectator and choreographic action, concentrating on the use of space. In goldroom we deepen the transgression with the use of light: bodies emerging from darkness, light as dramaturgy to determine a tension between interior and exterior. The ballroom of the Overlook Hotel, goldroom, is a space that acts on the body even before the body inhabits it.

On stage the six dancers are continuously doubled and delayed by cameras and monitors. What effect does this device have on the live performance? And how does the work of the body change when the performer also dialogues with their own altered image in real time?

The delay introduces a space between the gesture and its image. It is a temporal slippage, the evocation of a continuous ghost and of a temporality that becomes possibility. It is a captured movement. The body acts in the present, the image inhabits a recent past. In that gap the choreographic matter opens: doubling becomes instrument before it becomes effect.

You use MAX integrated with AI to create delays and video layering. In your case artificial intelligence does not seem a simple effect, but a true scenic partner. How did you build this dialogue between algorithm and human gesture?

In The Shining, in the goldroom, you hear the sounds of the party without seeing the dancing. It is a suggestion of overlapping temporalities. The algorithm allows us to work with delays and layerings calibrated to the time of the body. The machine recognizes the gesture and returns it multiplied, displaced. The dialogue works when the machine's response is precise enough to be unpredictable. In that margin something opens that resembles an improvisation — and there we determine the choreography.

In the project references emerge to Asian horror cinema, to Bacon, Lynch, and Cronenberg. How do these visual suggestions transform into choreographic movement without becoming citation?

They are perceptual thresholds, grammars — not forms to be replicated. Bacon's bodies are matter relating to fields of color, to space, finding new boundaries; Lynch, Cronenberg, and Asian horror cinema build tensions that saturate space even before anything happens; we work on rhythm, on sonic density, on bodies moving in the figural dimension, in the balance between the abstract and the figurative.

goldroom is a work that feeds on the architecture that hosts it. How does such a complex technological device adapt to always different spaces? And in what way does the place enter the dramaturgy?

Each time it is a matter of furnishing a room to find its exact dimension of hospitality. The process always begins with listening to the architecture — visual density, acoustic quality, the spaces and paths of the audience. These parameters enter the dramaturgy with the same authority as the dancers.

The Overlook Hotel cycle will close with pinkroom, dedicated to chromatic vibration. What will be the core of this third chapter? And how will your "living archive of memory" be completed?

For the moment we know that pinkroom will work to make a place perceptible through the fluctuation of color, continuing to develop a path that is both installative and traversable by the audience. Perhaps Overlook Hotel will not end with pinkroom. Color is one of the tools to bring into focus. We have many others, and we are having a great deal of fun.